Posted
by
timothy
on Sunday December 19, 2010 @11:32AM
from the with-very-few-exceptions-not-a-human-being dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at McGill University in Montreal have uncovered strong new evidence that that wildly-accepted mitochondrial free radical theory of aging (MFRTA) is wrong. MFRTA suggests that free radicals cause oxidative damage, which in turn leads to the aging process. This new evidence shows that high levels of Reactive Oxidative species are rather a biological signal used to combat aging then the process itself. This goes against claims of major health benefits from consuming foods and particularly supplements that contain antioxidants."

The radicals aren't free as in beer: you have to pay for them when you buy foods "high in free radicals". They are free as in speech, though, in that you don't need permission from the grocery store to pass them on when you are done with them. The bacteria at the sewage plant thank you.

If free radicals were responsible for (a large part) of aging then blueberry farmers would routinely live to be more than 100. Blueberries supposedly have the highest amount of anti-oxidants (by weight? volume? serving size?) of any food.

Potassium permanganate is a strong oxidizing agent. Wouldn't you prefer a strong reducing (=anti-oxidizing) agent instead? If so, try adding some lithium aluminium hydride, or sodium borohydride, or oxalic acid, or hydrazine to those cornflakes. Let us know how the "life extension" strategy works out.

If ANY diet made you live significantly longer we'd have noticed by now.

Same goes for exercise regimes, eg. If running five miles a day made you live longer we'd have noticed.

We can point to plenty of things that make your life shorter, eg. smoking, eating nothing but junk food, but I'm fairly sure that if you're living a reasonable lifestyle then genetics completely dominates. After that it's probably as much down to happiness as anything else.

It is pretty widely understood that a calorie-restricted diet (something like 30% fewer calories than the RDA, for humans) makes *any* animal live significantly longer and with fewer health problems. It's worked for everything it's been tested on. There have been some short-term studies on humans, but I'm not sure if there are any long-term ones.

But 'eat so much less that you're always hungry' is not an acceptable diet plan. We all just want to eat something *extra*, or take a pill, to fix it. I know I ca

This doesn't apply to people that are starving or otherwise malnourished. This is assuming a *balanced* calorie restricted diet. You still need the fats, proteins, carbs, vitamins, minerals. Just fewer calories.

I don't know all the answers to salorie restriction but it's been known about since 1934. Nearly 80 years is enough time to find out if it works in humans but I'm not aware of any practitioners living extra-long lives (and there's been plenty of people who tried it...)

If you plot a graph of size vs. lifespan in mammals it forms a fairly straight line. See here [senescence.info]. Humans already live much longer than the graph predicts (we're the dot marked "HS" on that graph) and we're not sure why. Maybe there's a connection. Maybe that's why calorie restriction doesn't work on humans because we're already a long way above the line.

It's not the sort of diet that you can stick to of your own free will. I'm sure that there have been short term attempts. Long term attempts...I seriously doubt it. (Note that simple starvation won't do. You've got to have properly balanced starvation. And this *does* make you more susceptible to infections and diseases, so it needs to be in healthy circumstances. Can always get warm enough, etc.)

The limitations on this strategy are severe enough that I really doubt it could be done on/by anyone who w

It's been known about for a long time and there have been plenty of practitioners. None have lived exceptionally long lives AFAIK.

What studies seem to suggest is that the long-term adverse effects of calorie restriction eventually catch up with the benefits and cancel them out. ie. Symptoms of aging are delayed a bit but when they arrive they're much worse.

We can point to plenty of things that make your life shorter, eg. smoking, eating nothing but junk food, but I'm fairly sure that if you're living a reasonable lifestyle then genetics completely dominates. After that it's probably as much down to happiness as anything else.

And avoid setting off the chain reaction that'll trip a systemic collapse and kill you. Seriously, I have some elderly in my family that seem to hang on by the thread of their lives but they do it year in and year out as long as a gentle breeze doesn't knock them off their feet. Others have seemed far more healthy, but then they get hit with a bad case of the flu that a 60 year old would recover from, a 40 year old would just be off his feet a few days but an 80 year old starts getting all sorts of other pr

If ANY diet made you live significantly longer we'd have noticed by now.

Two economists are walking down the street. One sees a hundred dollar bill lying on the pavement and bends down to pick it up. "Don't bother," says the other, "if it was real someone would have already picked it up by now."

Two economists are walking down the street. They see a hundred dollar bill lying on the pavement. They stand there for a while and watch several bank managers come along, pick it up, inspect it and put it down again.

One bends down to pick it up. "Don't bother," says the other, "if it was real one of those bankers would have kept it."

First of all, there are a huge variety of antioxidatns. It's really stupid to compare catechins, which are hydrosoluble, and curcuminoids, which are liposoluble. Both are antioxidants, but are not comparable.

Second: this study does not disprove the usefulness of antioxidants for preserving DNA integrity. OTOH, there are studies with evidence that anti-oxidants are effective in this sense.

Not quite, since what the supermarket calls blueberry is not necessarily what we are talking about. The most commonly sold one is vaccinium corymbosum, which has big fruits, but not a lot of the anthocyanins that are supposed to be good for you (they are white inside, not blue all through).

Anyway, there is evidence to suggest that aging is related to the shortening of telomeres; this is really a rather old idea, but apparently it has been gaining in strengths recently. In my view, ageing is just one of man

Haven't you noticed how people not so many years agou used to look quite old and frail already in their sixties, but now we are no longer surprised to find that people in their seventies are still physically active and mentally alert?

Yes. Then I realize that old people haven't changed... When I was 10, people in their 40s looked aged, people in their 60s looked very old and frail, and people in their 80s looked like something from a horror movie.

Now that I'm in my 30s, I find people in their 40s don't look so old. And people in their 60s don't look all that much different with the exception of some white/grey hair and a few more blemishes on their skin.

What would happen if they actually "cured aging". Would our system work if all the sudden people lived to 200 or 500 or... I would almost think, like that STNG episode where they all had to die at 60, maybe you would have to cap it a 100 or 150. If I could live to 100 as healthy as I am now (at 43) I would think that would be a pretty good life.

That is an excellent point, and one I have thought about on more than one occasion, but for different reasons. What would happen to social welfare and retirement pensions when the average person was drawing on them for 100 years, instead of 10 years? Would you have to forego Social Security payments if you "took the cure for aging"? Would only rich people be able to afford it, and then create an oppressive voting block over time in a democracy? Would you eventually just get bored with life even while yo

There would be tons of secondary problems come out of 'solving' the problem of aging too. For example a woman is born with all the eggs she will ovulate. Currently that's not an issue in most people as we tend to have kids around 20 or so years old, but as women push back childbirth in to the later part of their lives all kinds of issues start cropping up. Again, these issues can be over come with enough science, but as we all know that doesn't come cheap and will benefit the rich the most.

If most people would be able to stay reasonably healthy and with normal functional capacity for 500 years on average, then there is no reason or possibility for retirement at 60 - eternal life would naturally mean eternal work to sustain yourself, of course.

That's swell, but I don't think it so cut and dry. If extending the average age was gradual over time, then yes, there is no concern. I'm talking about a situation where we made an instant leap from 72 year average expectancy to double or better. I've given the situation more than a passing thought, and there are a lot of ramifications that aren't obvious at first glance. I don't know if such a "cure" is going to happen in my lifetime, if at all, but it is certainly possible. Globally, it has already d

Social security will survive with at least 75% benefits through at least 2050 (and probably beyond-- once the boomers start dying off the pressure drops). It would be better than that if they removed the payments to children and other survivors and if they treated it as insurance against poverty and means tested it. They could basically cap it at the inflation adjusted median income. You do not get any social security that exceeds $60,000 when added to your other income.

It would be one thing if you were healthy, 35, and live to 200 or 500. You would work and be productive. Birth control would be no more of a concern than it is now ( imo earth is already past the carrying capacity so it's just a question of critical failure in 35 years or 75 years.) Obviously, you'd need a strong tie between the immortality treatment and birth control (vasectomies for men, not sure what for women-everything we have now is invasive except iud/pill and those don't work for everyone)

Well to be fair, confusing cause and effect is terrifically easy in science, as is confusing correlation and causation. For the most part, science can only discover correlation, and assigning causation requires a sort of intellectual leap.

And all the fad diets and the industries built around them-- the problem there isn't "bad science". It's really a couple of bad things that happen regardless of how good the science is. First, you have bad news reporting. A single study comes out that suggests some sm

More generally, scientists should not confuse cause and effect. Or even more generally: correlation for causation. That's just bad science.

And yet, it seems to be rather prevalent. Especially in the questionable science of nutrition, where any slightly new idea can lead to a fortune in book sales, diet plans, drug development, etc.

Has a scientist ever told you to eat more antioxidants so you'd live longer? My gut tells me scientists are smarter than the people you actually hear this stuff from.It's one thing to say X seems to have effect on Y in your body, and another to say doing X will make you live longer.

CA:It's like blaming mechanics for the notion that changing your oil more frequently makes your car last longer. If you actually ask one, they'd tell you plainly, more frequently != more betterer...

Rather straightforward, isn't it? Why *does* a cell die, anyway? As long as it can grow and replicate, it shouldn't. Except for the telomere TTL-signal. Once we intervene in that, I think aging could be reduced or slowed drastically. I doubt there is much risk of cancer: cancer is when cells don't respond to normal apoptosis signals and keep growing. While removing the TTL-signal could be risky, I'm confident that cells with only the Time To Live removed could still respond normally to other signals. And while cancer *may* be lethal, aging is *always* lethal.

You don't need to remove the TTL, just reset it every fifty years or so.

A drug that restores the telomeres in each cell could be applied when needed, and then the telomeres would be shortened again at each cell division in the normal way.

There exists such a chemical, it's an enzyme it's called telomerase and it is actually active in a significant proportion of cells in the body. Either way the situation is far more nucanced than just the telomeres.

coughs, colds, fever, and yes, even Cancer. Scientists (mostly on payrolls) claimed all of the above. Part of it was a correlation == causation. Another part was executives telling them what to say.
Now, we have scientists that had found a correlation between aging and radicals. So, they used stats rather than hard proof to claim it. Why? Because SO MANY are in a hurry to be at the top of the heap.
Are radicals associated with aging? It would appear to be. Are radicals the cause of aging? Well, that needs t

'If you ask most people on the street what causes aging, many would say free radicals, but it's a complex story.'
—Dr. Siegfried Hekimi, McGill University

I'm pretty sure if you asked most people on the street what causes aging, a handful would say free radicals, while most would say time or God. Then if you followed up by asking them, "Don't you think it could be free radicals?" their answer would be "WTF are free radicals?"

The relevant journal article is available for free right now here [springerlink.com].

One thing that should be pointed out is that this article is in the January 2010 issue, and was initially published online in September 2009, so this isn't breaking news, though it looks like research may have continued in the same lab following this paper- there's no reference t paraquat in the paper, for instance. Another, which is touched on in the news article is that the scientists involved do not dispute that reactive oxygen species can have deleterious effects on living organisms- just that aging is not a process of mitochondria being injured by ROS.
Their conclusion spells it out:

It is difficult to doubt that mitochondria play a key role in
the aging process [67, 68]. However, although it is well documented that irreversible oxidative damage accumulates
during aging [69], it seems that the MFRTA’s core statement
that postulates that aging is triggered by the
detrimental action of ROS produced during normal
metabolism is simply wrong. It is not yet clear whether
aging has a single cause or whether such a notion is misguided.
In any case, the correlation between the presence of
oxidative damage and the aged phenotype simply does not
imply causation. Oxidative stress might be the consequence
of aging, if aging indeed has some discrete cause, or causes,
distinct from oxidative stress [40]. Alternatively, oxidative
stress might result from the failure of one particular maintenance system of the organism and thus participate in causing aging, but no more, as is often proposed in multicausal or unifying theories of aging [3–6]. Therefore, there is no reason to believe that it could not be beneficial to health to counteract the deleterious effects induced by ROS, at least in pathological situations. However, any intervention will nonetheless have to be very critically evaluated as clearly revealed by the antioxidant supplementation trials and in light of the increasing number of studies showing the crucial roles of ROS in cellular signaling.

Why do so many people think this is the case? That something manufactured is "not as good" as something natural. I'm sure there are as many cases where this is true as there are where this is false. Yet look at how organic foods have been taking off... I'd rather eat food that was kept bug-free by pesticides, and used fertilizer to make the plants grow to their maximum extent, and had preservatives added to keep the fruit at its tip-top freshness. (I know some organic food companies just add "organic" as a label that doesn't mean anything, but most organic producers follow some (if not all) of those rules.) Oh well... I guess people can eat what they choose, no matter what their rationale may be.

I dunno about most people, but I'll buy organic sometimes because it's usually indicative of a more sustainable farming process. I couldn't care less about the "all natural" part, but I do care about promoting intelligent usage of the (limited) resources on the planet.

Then again I'll be dead before it becomes a problem so what do I care.

It would be a less tenable position if the makers of processed food bothered at all to produce healthy products. Try to buy a box of crackers that hasn't had all the soluble fiber removed. You've got like two choices, and they both cost more than the products next to them which likely took more effort to refine.

Personally I'd feel safer strolling down a supermarket drug aisle and popping a random pill than I would walking into the woods and eating a random mushroom. At the same time, I wouldn't trust the research lab telling me the corn-that-produces-its-own-pesticide is just fine for me farther than I could throw the CEOs lexus.

Take a look at the crap nutritional value presented by the refined products, and the amount of corruption of science when it comes to analyzing health effects of some company's latest brainchild, and it leaves plenty of toehold for the "natural is good" meme to take root. If the research was not so clouded by money, and wasn't done almost exclusively on corporate patent-babies, people would be less likely to believe the crap they read on the food supplement sites.

In the end it all comes down to trust, and the ability to verify that trust.

Organic food is almost all grown the exact same was as regular food: on large, industrial farms, in large volumes, for a profit. The only difference is that the expense of Organic food comes from the limited supply (due to demand as well as a higher rate of spoilage), while the expense of normal food comes from making it better, cheaper, and safer.

Are you trolling, or just ignorant? Most people don't know what organic food is, but if you're going to make an argument about it, why not educate yourself on the subject first rather than just spout your own prejudices for everyone on the internet to read?

Food quality has been on a steady decline. Poisons and hormone-mimickers in food are steadily going up while nutrients like minerals and vitamins are going down. Read the studies about it and wonder why this is so, all while buying cheaper food in larger quantities. The long list doesn't end there however, the earth itself is being drained of nutrients due to unhealthy mono-culture and non-stop farming each and every year. For many farmers, this is more important, so there is a big shift today to organic farming, just because of the higher sustainable development factor. If we destroy the earth, famine is not too far away. If we destroy nature or cut outself out from it too much, we may have to turn to genetic engineering to be able to sustain healthy bodies, always fighting new unknown diseases, not a very pleasant prospect except for the medical industry.

Organic farming can be many different ways, with the more extreme end being biodynamic farming. It is true that you can have large farms producing roughly the same yield as "modern farms", at least if you compare nutrients. Many people have the opinion that you can eat less of organic foods, and still feel satiated. So less yield does not necessarily mean less food.

This clockwork-universe mentality that everything to food and life is about proteins, minerals, vitamins, and this obsession of getting rid of dirt and bugs, is well, an hypothesis without basis in nature. Many people believe that there is more to food than what we can measure in its quantities. Life is certainly about more than its parts. If you lack this understanding, you've been living in the city for too long. It's clouding your judgement, so time to take a break off media and city, find some new fresh perspectives in nature.

Btw, IANAF (I Am Not A Farmer), however, I know there is alot to organic farming and sustainable development, than our prejudices. Currently living outside major cities, and it does bring a different perspective to life than endless visits to cafes and caffe lattes.

Before you condemn something, at least give it a fair shot first, hmm?

Many of the chemicals used in pesticides (pyrethroids, organophosphates, carbamates, etc.) have been clearly determined to be: Human Carcinogens, Mutagens, Abortives, Hormone Analogs, Irritants and Toxins (particularly Neurotoxins.) As a chemist and biologist, I'm certain you can understand just how bloody difficult it is to make a chemical that kills one class of invertebrates (Insecta), and has virtually no impact whatsoever on any other class. I'd be more than happy to sit down and discuss absorption, uptake, metabolism, cytotoxicity, the most common effects and their biological mechanism of any of these chemicals. I would also be happy to talk about their impact and biological pathways on micro and macrofauna including Fish, Bird, Reptile, and Mammalian species (and let's not forget Homo Sapiens.) Though a quick look at the impact of these chemicals on a wide variety of species (eg. DDT on the Brown Pelican and Peregrine Falcon), and the statistical information surrounding the dramatic increase of Cancer, Miscarriage, Birth Defect, Neurological Disease and Negative Childhood Epidemiology among farm workers (age, sex, race, and economically normalized for fair comparison), should provide sufficient evidence to make any open minded scientists more than a wee bit uncomfortable with spraying these chemical all over the scenery and particularly the watershed for much of this country.

This is not emotional. This is simple science. Like the mistaken agricultural misuse of antibiotics to increase animal health and yield, in fact producing nothing more than super-colonies of antibiotic resistant bacteria for miles surrounding such farms. You speak of emotion. There is an equally emotion-based use of the magic of modern chemistry to solve problems whose solutions themselves become the new problems. Case in point, this is as much a magical thinking, superstitious problem as any "Being afraid of chemicals." There are thousands of places on the planet, where the trade-off in human suffering demands extraordinary measures. Killing off a plague of malarial mosquitoes immediately jumps to mind. Using the chemical equivalent of an atom bomb to make you fruit prettier however, seems to me, a poor use of this technology. Let's "Right Size" our chemical arsenal, and save the extreme solution for the extreme circumstances.

"This goes against claims of major health benefits from consuming foods and particularly supplements that contain antioxidants."/quote?

Good thing that worms in a lab are so biologically analogous to humans. Time to stop eating tomatoes, broccoli, and spinach

I stopped doing that decades ago after I grew up and couldn't be forced to eat them. Now I look at my friends who are vegetarians, and am shocked at how old they look compared to my mostly meat-eating self.

Oh yeah? Well, I stopped eating all together, and became like the entire Pantheon all rolled up into one ball of pure awesomeness. The merest hint of a waft of my scent drives all the most beautiful women crazy. Try it.

I completely understand vegetarian and vegan philosophy, although I'm not interested in participating. But I have noticed the same thing, that all the vegetarians I know are all pasty white and sickly looking, although there are obviously exceptions. Not sure if that is because of the lack of meat, or if just pasty and sickly people are more likely to give up meat. I won't eat veal, and *hate* the way we currently raise animals for meat, but I'm pretty sure we evolved to eat critters. They're tasty, too

If you want to eat a severely restricted diet, then you must spend osme time to consider what replacements to eat to sustain your long-term health, you can't just skip a major food group and rely on things working out by themselves. Some vegans do it, some don't - and suffer after some time.

You can't stay healthy on salad and tomatoes; I know some extremely healthy vegans who eat an extreme variety of foods every day that I don't consume in significant amounts - nuts, sprouts, berries, extreme variety of fo

Funny, being vegetarian and looking at others, seeing how old they look, I'm more inclined to believe it has more to do with genes. I believe there is a clockwork in our body, making us older, by programming rather than something that has to happen. I believe there are drugs you can take to supposedly "slow the aging process", but it's not been proven yet.

Especially when thinking about the massive amounts of Cola and candies I've consumed;-)

I always got the sense that the antioxidant craze was healthwashing run amok. Every time I've looked into it there seem to be as many detriments as benefits. From what I've read, oxidation plays a role in so many different processes isn't it unclear whether its good or bad as a whole?

A lot of proteins in these worms really are, but still, it's insane to jump at these conclusions so quickly...

The article here also has a link to a paper of him from 2009 which seems to be about mice, but then again it's in a low-impact-factor journal. Since his findings would be of great interest for a broad audience this might be a sign of shabby/incomplete research (interesting enough for a big paper but not good enough)...

Can't say more before I'm on a computer with access to the journal to actually read it though.

With your asbestos example, I think the connection is pretty clear, the anti-aging connection was assumed in the case of anti-oxidants, with (apparently) little effort to investigate to confirm the hypothesis.

I never did really understand the claims for anti-oxidants, it was always a vague argument from anti-oxidant proponents and food product packages. I'm sure they're good, but when people just go overboard on anything, it's usually not a good thing.

Cholesterol is necessary for proper cardiovascular and adrenal function. Most people synthesize enough so that they don't really need to eat a significant amount of cholesterol. However, some people's bodies do not synthesize enough cholesterol to remain healthy (folks with certain adrenal gland disorders for example - more specifically the liver may be functioning what would normally be adequate but due to the adrenal disorder supplemental cholesterol intake may be required to make the adrenal glands funct

PUFAs are unstable, oxidize spontaneously when introduced to a human body, and generally wreck havoc in a warm-blooded mammalian systems (fish need these thin oils because they live in cold water). No amount of anti-oxidants is enough to counter the damage done by rancid oils.

[citation needed]

Seriously, you can't just spout something like that and expect us to take your word for it. Is even a single link too much work?

Glad to know that primitive peoples who don't use those kinds of oils are so healthy and age so well...

FYI, coconut oil is not totally saturated (IV 14 or so). Even in its ultrahardened (by hydrogenation) form, it can still undergo oxidative breakdown and form peroxides in one of the early steps. It admittedly does so at a slower rate than highly unsaturated oils.

How do I know? I worked in a quality control lab that measured the iodine value (a measure of saturation) and the peroxide value (a measure of oxidative deterioration) in coconut oils among many others.

Both butterfat (IV 30 or so) and lamb fat (IV also around 30) are not completely saturated. They also undergo oxidative decay of this sort.

Essentially no natural source oil is completely saturated. The only ones I've seen that were have been chemically prepared synthetics (Captex 300 comes to mind)

FYI number 2: The coconut oil is deodorized as well. It also is sometimes hardened with hydrogenation depending on the application.

My facility was set up for kosher processing and we didn't do animal based oils. But many processed animal fats are also deodorized with high temperature steam just like plant oils.

There are a whole range of other questionable things in your post beyond the lack of knowledge of oil chemistry.

There are many well known reasons for accelerated aging of skin in some people. Over exposure to sun. Smoking. Genetics, etc.

Seriously? The link between increased saturated fat consumption and increased risk of coronary disease is one of the most well-established findings of modern dietary science.

there aren't any studies that show otherwise.

Just to start [google.com]. It's only page one and over half of them show statistically significant links. You can say there are new studies that cast doubt on these results, or you can say there are methodological problems with these studies that make their results less valid, but to claim there aren't any studies showing the link is both false and irresponsible.